“The color temperature of your screen is set according to the position of the sun. A different color temperature is set during night and daytime.

During twilight and early morning, the color temperature transitions smoothly from night to daytime temperature to allow your eyes to slowly adapt. At night the color temperature should be set to match the lamps in your room.

This is typically a low temperature at around 3000K-4000K (default is 3700K). During the day, the color temperature should match the light from outside, typically around 5500K-6500K (default is 5500K). The light has a higher temperature on an overcast day.”

Install Red Shift on Ubuntu

Setting location

For Redshift to work effectively (i.e. match your time zone) you need to use some command-line fu to set your location. Don’t intake breath so sharply — it’s painless!

Head over to getlatlon.com to find the correct longitude and latitude for your country/city. Then, open up a terminal and enter the following command using the location found above as lat:lon like so: –

redshift -l 55.7:12.6

So for Malmö, Sweden you would enter:-

redshift -l 55.6:13.0

Setting Auto-Start

If you wish to have Redshift run automatically (without needing a terminal open) then set it as a System > Preferences > Start-up Application using the same command as above or, to use Redshift with a toggle-able tray icon, use the command ‘gtk-redshift’ instead of ‘redshift’.

Alas it has a sucky non-mono tray icon. Whose going to be first to sort that out?